The whistle blows: Half time in the MCM Project

Just under a month on from the completion of the first quarter, the MCM Project has now made it halfway in this epic journey. That’s right! 74 of the 148 stations that currently make up the Mexico City Metro Network have been visited and documented on this page. So it is time to look back on some of the happenings of this second quarter of the project and also to give you a little bit of extra information about the Mexico City Metro.

The second quarter started at Balbuena where I feasted on some tasty Yucatecan snacks, there was market madness at Merced and a clown adding colour to drabness at La Paz.

Lawyers and old-timers kept me company around Doctores, great retro street art stood out at San Antonio Abad and a 900 kg Korea – Mexico friendship bell rang true whilst cosplay enthusiasts basked under the golden sun in Bicentenary Park near Refineria.

The MCM project came home for visit number 50 with a street art tour around Isabel La Catolica.

Then there was the impossibly named Camarones (Shrimp) Station where organ grinders were just one part of the flurry of activity.

Stalin, Lenin and Marx aptly showed their faces in the ‘First of May’ neighborhood around Romero Rubio, more old-timers dusted off their dancing shoes and got their groove on around Division Del Norte and a revolutionary artisan appeared on the scene at Cuitlahuac.

A canine pal led me to great tacos at the station where Frida Kahlo first entered the project – Constituyentes, I made new friends at Refugees’ House near Hospital General and I entered the head of ex-president Benito Juarez in my roaming around Guelatao.

And all that is just a smattering of what was the second quarter of the MCM Project.

Last week during my wanderings (near Salto de Agua – station to come) I happened to come across the Metro Network Headquarters. Surrounding the precinct there is a photographic exhibition which documents the life, history and construction of the Mexico City Metro. I learnt quite a bit about the Mexico City Metro in relation to other Metro systems in the world;

It is the eighth largest metro system in the world in number of stations after New York, Paris, Seoul, Madrid, London, Tokyo and Berlin.

With 11 currently in operation (Line 12 under construction) the metro also ranks eighth in number of lines after New York, Paris, Cologne, Madrid, Tokyo, London and Moscow.

With an annual average of 1417 million passengers (wow! almost 1 and a half billion!) it is the fifth most patronized metro after Tokyo, Moscow, Seoul and New York.

The Mexico City Metro started operating on September 4 1969 ( just over a month after man first landed on the moon) making it the world’s 31st metro system. The first was opened in London on January 10 1863.

With 201 kilometres of track it is the world’s ninth longest after London, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Madrid, Moscow, Shanghai and Paris.

The 3 peso ticket price makes the Mexico City Metro System the world’s fifth cheapest after Chennai and Kolkata in India, Kazan in Russia and Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine.